YouTube Transcript Scraper: Captions, Subtitles & Text

What does YouTube Transcript Scraper do?

YouTube Transcript Scraper gets the transcript of any YouTube video or Short as plain text, timestamped segments, SRT or VTT subtitles, Markdown with timestamps, or RAG-ready chunks, in any language the video has captions for. It returns human captions when they exist and YouTube's auto-generated captions otherwise, plus the video's title, channel, duration, views, keywords and description.

Paste a list of video links or IDs and get clean transcripts in seconds, with no YouTube API key. Videos without captions, private or removed videos are never billed.

It runs on the Apify platform, so you also get an API, scheduling, integrations (Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, n8n, Slack) and access for AI agents through the Apify MCP server.

Why use it?

• 🤖 AI and RAG pipelines: feed video content to ChatGPT, Claude or your vector database, already split into chunks with timestamps.
• ✍️ Content repurposing: turn videos into blog posts, newsletters, social posts and show notes.
• 🔍 Research and analysis: analyse what competitors, creators or experts say across hundreds of videos.
• 🎓 Study and accessibility: searchable text of lectures and tutorials.
• 🎬 Subtitles: download SRT or VTT files ready for video editors.

How to get the transcript of a YouTube video

1. Click Try for free.
2. Paste YouTube links (one per line): youtube.com/watch?v=..., youtu.be/..., Shorts and live links all work.
3. Optionally set the preferred languages (en, es, de...) and the output formats.
4. Click Start.
5. Download the transcripts as JSON, CSV or Excel, or copy them from the Transcripts view.

Input

Field	Description	Default
videos	Video links or IDs	required
languages	Preferred caption languages, in order (es also matches es-419)	the video's own
fallbackToOtherLanguage	Return another language when the preferred one does not exist	true
preferManualCaptions	Human captions before auto-generated ones	true
outputs	text, segments, srt, vtt, markdown, chunks	text, segments
includeMetadata	Channel ID, duration, views, keywords, description	true

{
  "videos": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ", "https://youtu.be/arj7oStGLkU"],
  "languages": ["en"],
  "outputs": ["text", "segments", "srt"]
}

Output

One record per video. You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

{
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "status": "ok",
  "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video) (4K Remaster)",
  "channel": "Rick Astley",
  "durationSeconds": 213,
  "viewCount": 1820283482,
  "language": "en",
  "languageName": "English",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "availableLanguages": [{ "languageCode": "en", "languageName": "English", "isAutoGenerated": false }],
  "text": "♪ We're no strangers to love ♪ ♪ You know the rules and so do I ♪ ...",
  "segments": [{ "start": 18.64, "end": 21.88, "text": "♪ We're no strangers to love ♪" }],
  "wordCount": 487
}

Data fields

Field	Description
text	The transcript as paragraphs
segments	Lines with start and end in seconds
srt, vtt	Subtitle files
markdown	Paragraphs with [HH:MM:SS] timestamps, ready for LLMs and notes
chunks	~1,000-character pieces with start/end time and a token estimate, for RAG
language, isAutoGenerated	Language of the transcript and whether YouTube generated it automatically
availableLanguages	Every caption track of the video
title, channel, durationSeconds, viewCount, keywords, description	Video details
status	ok (billed), no-captions, unavailable or error (not billed)

How much does it cost to scrape YouTube transcripts?

Event	Price
Run start (per GB of memory, default 256 MB)	$0.001
Transcript (one video, all formats, with video details)	$0.003

1,000 transcripts cost $3, residential proxies included. Videos without captions, private or removed videos and failures are never billed. Set Max cost per run and the Actor stops cleanly at that limit.

Use it with AI agents (MCP)

Add https://mcp.apify.com?tools=fguiraud/youtube-transcript-scraper to Claude, Cursor or any MCP client and ask:

• "Summarize this video and list the key takeaways: https://youtu.be/arj7oStGLkU"
• "Get the transcripts of these 10 videos and tell me what each creator recommends."
• "Write a blog post based on this YouTube tutorial."

Smallest useful input for an agent: {"videos": ["https://youtu.be/arj7oStGLkU"], "outputs": ["text"]}.

Tips

• For AI summaries of long videos, choose markdown or chunks: timestamps let the model cite the exact moment.
• Choose only the outputs you need: smaller results are faster to download.
• languages: ["es", "en"] returns Spanish when it exists and English otherwise.
• Long runs are safe: if the platform restarts the run, finished videos are skipped and never charged twice.

FAQ and limitations

• Videos without captions: some videos have neither human nor automatic captions (many Shorts, music without lyrics, very new uploads, some live streams). They come back with status: "no-captions" and are not billed.
• Age-restricted, private and members-only videos cannot be read without signing in; they come back as unavailable and are not billed.
• Translation into languages the video has no captions for is not included.
• Is it legal? The Actor reads the captions YouTube shows publicly on each video. Respect the rights of the video creators when you reuse their content.
• Found a problem or need a feature? Open an issue on the Issues tab. Replies within 48 hours.

Related tools

• Audio & Video to Text Transcription (Whisper): transcribe your own audio and video files (MP3, MP4, WAV, Google Drive or Dropbox links) with Whisper.
• Podcast Transcript Scraper: transcripts of any podcast by name, Apple Podcasts link or RSS feed.